helmet testing

I have been jealous of our British readers for sometime now, as the government in the UK has seen it fit not only to have one of the best helmet safety rating systems known to man, but they have made their test results incredibly accessible to the two-wheeled going public. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s worth taking a look at Britain’s SHARP website before buying your next lid.

SHARP takes impact analysis from five regions of the helmet, and then based on analysis from which points on the helmet are statistically more likely to be hit during a crash, assigns a weighted score to the helmet’s safety score.

Basing laboratory analysis with real world probabilities, SHARP is perhaps the most pragmatic rating system available for motorcyclists, but more importantly it is the most transparent and accessible.

Well know it looks like we can be jealous of Australia as well, as our riding brothers and sisters down under have their own public database of helmet crash statistics, appropriately called CRASH, which like its British counterpart, does away with some of the guess work in helmet safety, and makes that data available to consumers.

How many recalls does it take before the NHTSA tells you to get out of the motorcycle helmet business? Well if you’re Advanced Carbon Composites, the answer is five – five motorcycle helmet recalls in a row. For a company that warns buyers away from buying inferior products from China and India, Advanced Carbon Composites (ACC) has had a number of problems with its EXT series (all four of them) of motorcycle helmets, including the helmets failing to meet the basic DOT safety guidelines, which finally lead to the ACC ceasing to produce motorcycle helmets at the behest of the NHTSA.